MY NEARLY HALF A CENTURY SEARCHING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

Today I reach back to three postings, the first a dozen years ago, 23 May 2010:

A HALF A CENTURY SEARCHING FOR ALIEN SIGNALS

Why this topic?  Perhaps some stimulation sparked by the James Webb Space Telescope, which has begun a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).  Just another in my primary quests seeking ultimate answers on topics like peace (The 10% Solution), energy (Starpower for Humanity) and Planet Earth (Geoengineering for Climate Change).  Yesterday set the stage for this future with The Three Grand Miracles.  

My professional career was dedicated to those above interest areas. For SETI, it all began with an assignment at NASA's Ames Research Center in 1976.  Answering the question of Are We Alone? to the potential of receiving The Encyclopedia Galactica from superior space civilizations fascinated my imagination.

In many ways that first paper on SETI by Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi in 1959 set the stage for what we have today.  My first step:

In 1974 I participated in a NASA activity called Earth 2020, and became close friends of the leaders of another project entitled Project Cyclops, a $10 billion effort to conduct the search.  One of the first questions in the early days was:  Are there other planets in the Universe?  So in 1976 I joined 19 other faculty members at the NASA Ames Research Center, and while the others focused on an interferometric technique, I was allowed to find a more direct method.

The one major effort  since then was the Allen Telescope Array, mostly financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for about $25 million in 2007, now being managed by the Stanford Research Institute with the cooperation of the SETI Institute.

In 2015 Russian billionaire Yuri Milner provided most of the funding for various Breakthrough Prizes to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life and transmitting messages into space:

• Breakthrough Listen received $100 million and dedicated telescope time beginning in 2016 for a decade.

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  Breakthrough Message will study the ethics of sending messages into deep space.  There will be an open competition with a $1 million prize pool to design a digital message.
• To the right, Milner with wife Julie.

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  Breakthrough Starshot is another $100 million program, co-funded with Mark Zuckerberg, to develop a proof-of-concept light sail spacecraft fleet to Alpha Centauri at 20% the speed of light with a 20-year journey time.
• Breakthrough Enceladus will work with NASA to explore the possibility of life on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

What am I doing today for SETI?  Just a cheerleader.

Super Typhoon Hinnamnor is today at 150 MPH, with the eye heading for Miyakojima.  It is the first Category 5 ocean storm of the season.  The path is moving southwest, but soon will essentially make a right turn and move between Taiwan and Naha into the Taiwan Strait.  Not sure today whether landfall will be China, South Korea or Japan.  Watch this exciting video.

This brings back further memories you can read in my posting on Okinawa for 3 September 2019:

....my first trip to Miyakojima.  This was more than two decades ago, and I was one of the leaders of an international effort entitled Green Enertopia to select an island for each country to serve as the symbol of energy self-sufficiency.  Miyakojima seemed to be the ideal site for Japan, so I flew there and met with the Mayor over dinner.  He seemed disinterested in what I was saying until I noted that the island had something called Strongman, the triathlon of Japan.  While it ends with a marathon, the other two segments are shorter than the Iron Man.  Anyway, it turns out that, like Kailua-Kona, this is their biggest event of the year.  While the Mayor's face lit up when I mentioned Strongman, he then practically gave me the key to the city when I mentioned that, by the way, Judy and John Collins, the inventors of the concept, were good friends of mine.  This interaction went a long way into making Miyakojima, now, the solar island of Japan. 

In that article was a photo of a lunch I had with Bob Nakasone, John Tasato and Tomoyo Nonaka three years ago at Orchids.

• Bob and John are the leaders of that Okinawa Festival we were planning to attend at the end of October.  However, we decided to bypass Okinawa because Japan is having a terrible time with the pandemic, and Okinawa has been the worst hit prefecture/capita.  John and his wife recently moved into Arcadia, while we are still working on Bob and his wife to join 15 Craigside.

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  Tomoyo Nonaka (here with Henk Rogers of Hawaii) is a former female anchor on NHK and was chairperson of Sanyo Electric.  I had earlier met her in 2013 at an OTEC gathering, and she was serving as an honorary ambassador from Kumejima, which has an OTEC facility. 
• Professor Mac Takahashi (bottom right) of Tokyo University and I somewhat seriously urged Tomoyo to run for Japan Prime Minister.  He is to the right below with Professor Yasu Ikegami (at the top of the photo) from Saga University, who is currently the OTEC professor for the world.

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WHAT HAVE I ACCOMPLISHED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII?

This blog site is into my 18th year.  Thought I'd glance at how many partly written articles were in storage and  spent yesterday discarding many of them.  There were around 450.  After a hundred or so I gave up, and still have around 350 drafts.  However, one was the basis for my posting today.

I was born and grew up in Honolulu, but did not spend any school time at the University of Hawaii until August of 1972, when I was hired by the College of Engineering as an assistant professor.  So it's been 53 years since I first came to the main Manoa Campus.

• 
  I originally taught Fortran IV Programming and a couple of other computer courses.  This is the textbook I used.  I knew the co-authors, Paul Murrill and Cecil Smith.  Murrill went on to become president of LSU.
• After a couple of years, I joined the Civil Engineering Department.  Environmental Engineering and Technology & Society were two courses where I had more than a hundred students for some semesters. 
• But teaching takes a lot time and effort, where there is pressure to  get research funds and publish papers for promotion and gaining tenure.

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  My research topics focused on geothermal reservoir engineering and laser biochemical engineering (my PhD dissertation topic), where the student I hired to do the  lab work, Bill Bow, went on to found his own engineering consulting firm.  He was selected for the Lifetime Achievement Award last year by the Hawaii Council of Engineering Societies.  
• The fact that he is now retired says a lot about how long I've been here.  I still maintain a functioning office with two computers, a sound system and assorted other stuff.  Here below are some displays and  photos on my wall.
• The first one is a best sellers list from the local newspaper showing two of my books in the top ten.

• That map on the wall is of the St. Andrews Old Course, where I've golfed several times.  A microwave oven and refrigerator with drinkables.

• In 1987, during a trip to Europe I bought a print of Van Gogh's Blue Irises, which set a record for the most expensive painting ever sold, $54 million.  This is a replica from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Some of my awards.

The item below is a fake press release Harvey Meyerson and I created way back in 1981 when we were working for Senator Spark Matsunaga.  Why this specific topic?  His political advisory committee had picked crime and punishment as the focus of his re-election campaign, when he did nothing in this area.  Nary a bill, speech or anything of that relevance.   If this press release had ever gone out, we would have been fired.

Following, the scorecard of the ultimate golf game I played in 2007, scoring a 74.  I had separated my right shoulder when I tripped across a rope at the Ala Wai Golf course a few months earlier, and this was the first time I had played since then.  Swinging was still a problem, so I did not try to hit the ball too hard.  You'd think this would have taught me a lesson.

I worked closely on these two below bills which became law, and Chairman of the Senate Energy and Resources Committee, Scoop Jackson, arranged for me to get copies.  I had a special relationship with him because Senator Matsunaga did not get to many committee sessions, and Jackson voted up or down for Sparky depending on which way my thumb faced.

My final passion is the Blue Revolution.  I have a Blue Dragon as our mascot.

Someone gave me this sign.  Can't imagine why.

So what have I accomplished at the University of Hawaii?

• In 1976 I was on the team that discovered, drilled for (to a depth of 6450 feet), and found what at that time was the hottest geothermal well in the world.  We produced electricity for 2000 people on the Big Island.

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  I might add that this region of Puna was then isolated, and close by there were illegal patches of marijuana.  They were among the most vocal opponents of geothermal energy development, and had funds to fight our efforts.

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  I was on leave from the UH from 1979 to 1982, and staffed the passage of original legislation in hydrogen, OTEC, wind energy and seabed mining, while working for U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga in DC.

• 
  Returned to Manoa and became director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) while, with Dean of Engineering Paul Yuen, creating the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR).  

• 
  These two organizations were awarded more than $100 million to build the first open-cycle ocean thermal energy conversion at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii on the Big Island, a biomass-to-methanol facility on Maui, and a range of renewable energy operations on all the major islands.

• 
  HNEI became the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen Center, U.S. Department of Interior's Marine Mineral Technology Center, and National Science Foundation's Marine Bioproducts Engineering Research Center.
• 40 years after being founded, PICHTR today has a sterling board of directors.

• 
  Also spent assignments with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in laser fusion and the NASA Ames Research Center in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

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  I retired in 1999, but 26 years later, still have an office in the Pacific Ocean Science and Technology Building, where I have been trying to develop the Blue Revolutions.  Watch these two videos.
• 2022 TEDx talk on the Blue Revolution.
• 2012 presentation on the Pacific International Ocean Station.
• 
  While in retirement, wrote three books.
• SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth
• SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity.
• Simple Solution Essays.

• 
  I also published more than 100 articles in the Huffington Post.  Typical one-page summaries of topics such as the Blue Revolution, Star Power for Humanity, the Stanford Marshmallow Test, 10% Simple Solution to Peace, Human Cloning, Biofuels from Algae, the Future of Sustainable Aviation, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the Ultimate Ocean Ranch, Geoengineering of Climate Change and The Venus Syndrome.

To close, three sporting events.

• Lottie Woad, 21-year old from the UK, won the Scottish Open today.  This was her initial LPGA event.  She just was victorious in the Irish Open as an amateur earlier this month.  She no doubt is the favorite at the AIG Women's Open, which starts on Thursday at Royal Porthcawl in Wales.  This is a different course from where the men had their Open, which was the Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland.
• 
  Hard to believe that the NFL will begin pre-season play this week.  The Hall of Fame Game between the Detroit Lions and Los Angeles Charger will also be on Thursday.

• 
  Week Zero in college football is not until August 23 when Iowa State plays Kansas State in Dublin, Ireland.  Aviva Stadium opened in 2010, and has already showcased 4 previous U.S. football games.  There will be 8 other weekend games, ending with Stanford at Hawaii.

Typhoon Krosa is up to 90 MPH, and heading for Japan.  However, models show the eye making almost a right turn, and take a path parallel to the Honshu coastline, sufficiently far enough away not to cause any serious damage.

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HOW MANY PLANETS ARE THERE IN THE UNIVERSE?

Nearly forty years ago, I spent some time at the NASA Ames Research Center to work on the search for exoplanets (planets outside our solar system).  To quote from one of my Huffington Post articles more than six years ago:

In Chapter 4 of Simple Solutions for Humanity, I relate my experiences in this field, starting with Project Cyclops, and also Orion, a short stint I had at NASA's Ames Research Center. The question then was, are the planets in our solar system the only ones in the universe? I interacted then with Barney Oliver, Jack Billingham and Carl Sagan, and actually proposed a project to detect earth-sized planets. The concept rested on the principle that for life to occur, there needs to be an atmosphere, and starlight (sunlight) causes population inversion (a condition which induces lasing), meaning that spikes of monochromatic light can be detected, both proving that a planet exists and providing the gas composition. I took cues from Charles Townes, who had just moved from MIT to Cal-Berkeley and wrote on this subject in Science. NASA tossed my proposal aside and remarked that the Hubble Telescope would soon fly and will then accomplish this task. Well, earth-sized extrasolar planets are beyond the capability of Hubble.

So four decades later, where are we with respect to extrasolar planets (same as exoplanets)?  

• Scientists have now found 2001 planets in 1267 star systems.
• However, the Hubble (that's astronomer Edwin Hubble) Telescope finally was able to detect one almost a quarter century after I left NASA.  The first truly reliable observation came two decades after my proposal, although there is some growing support for the very first coming in 1988, an effort that did not use any Hubble data.

• The Kepler (Johannes Kepler to the right) Space Observatory, launched around the time I published that HuffPo mentioned above, has found more than half of these planets.  However, the method used depends on planets diminishing the brilliance of the star during transit, so the concept is incredibly crude and works only because there are so many stars out there.
• As starlight can be billions of times more brilliant than planetlight, only supermassive planets (larger than Jupiter) can be detected with current direct measurement techniques.
• There is an assortment of techniques, but the transiting method of Kepler and the indirect analysis coming from star wobbles (that is, if a planet is revolving around a star, the shift in position of the star is mathematically modeled to predict that there must be a planet or two or more involved) are most favored.

Is space exploration a waste of money compared to our need for global climate change remediation, migrant support, war, education and so on?  Well, here are two analyses:

GDP in 2004	Percent spent on space
USA	11.8 trillion	0.14%
Europe	11.7 trillion	0.03% (not inc. individual agencies)
Japan	3.7 trillion	0.05%
China	7.3 trillion	0.02%
Russia	1.4 trillion	0.06%
India	3.3 trillion	0.03%

It's also interesting to work out how much is spent per person:

	Population	Space spending per person in 2005
USA	0.3 billion	$54
Europe	0.6 billion	$5.80 (not inc. indiv agencies)
Japan	0.1 billion	$18
China	1.3 billion	92c
Russia	0.1 billion	$9
India	1.1 billion	82c

In any progressive society, some small sum should be set aside for activities supporting art, basic science and a range of exploratory endeavors.  Looking at the larger picture, the world spends one-hundredth of 5 percent, or 0.05%, of the global domestic product on space exploration.  However, this includes Mars-related expenditures, which, to me, are grossly unnecessary, for there is no reason at this time to go to the Red Planet.  A millennium from now, or later, maybe, but not now.  Worse, in the USA, Congress about a quarter century ago passed some legislation that PROHIBITS the expenditure of the Federal budget on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which was somewhat relaxed in 2003.  

In any case, while I continue to harbor a sour grapes attitude that NASA ignored my proposal to track extrasolar planet orbits utilizing the simple fact that planetary atmospheres emanate very fine wavelengths (that is, they lase) representing the gaseous composition--which would have accomplished this task sooner and cheaper, plus with the knowledge of the atmospheric composition--times have changed, for now know there are exoplanets, so the focus should shift to actually SEARCHING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE.  

Until only around two decades ago, we thought there were only nine (and actually 8, for Pluto is now a plotoid) planets.  Now that we know, by extrapolation, there are probably a septillion or quadrillion (they both can be used for 10 to the 24th power) planets in our Universe, let us proceed towards something like what Carl Sagan and Jodie Foster produced in CONTACT:

Are the clues for eternal peace, fusion power and the Encyclopedia Galactica streaming in from civilizations billions of year ahead of us?

As it remains useful to pinpoint planets ideal for potential intelligent life, for "listening" would thus be more efficient, we have an opportunity to learn about the state-of-the-science through a public presentation:

At 7:30PM on Wednesday, 2 December 2015 at the University of Hawaii Manoa Campus Art Auditorium, you can interact with four of the top scholars in exoplanets:

• Andrew Howard:  Institute for Astonomy, University of Hawaii
• Nader Haghighipour:  Instute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
• Paul Kalas:  Adjunct Professor of Astronomy, University of California at Berkeley
• Josh Winn:  Associate Professor of Physics, MIT

All the above is free if you come by bus or avoid parking on campus, for you will then be charged $6.

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